Can I Use Avios To Pay For Seats?

If you are fed up with the choice between sitting in the middle seat or forking out more cash to choose a seat in advance you’ll be pleased to hear you can use Avios to pay for seats. Unsurprisingly, however, it isn’t very good value! Let’s ignore that for a moment and take a look at what value you get when redeeming your Avios to pay for seats…

How much do seat reservations cost?

The cost varies depending on your class of travel, destination and whether you choose a seat with an extra benefit e.g. extra legroom on an emergency exit row. Here are some example prices taken from the British Airways website…

Euro Traveller (short haul economy) – from £7

Word Traveller (long haul economy) – from £20, twin seats from £30 & exit row seats from £50

World Traveller Plus (long haul premium economy) – from £18 & exit row seats from £50

Club Europe (short haul business class) – from £20

Club World (long haul business class) – from £55

First Class – seat selection is always free at time of booking

The key thing to note is ALL these prices are from depending on the route and other factors and are also based on a single flight for one person. You could easily end up paying a lot more! You can check the cost by making a dummy booking, after you select the passengers you are asked if you want to select seats. Here you can view the costs and then exit the checkout process. If you already have a booking you can check by going to reserve a seat from the ‘manage my booking’ section of the British Airways website.

More information is available on the British Airways website – https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/seating/reserving-your-seat

So what is the Avios value when using Avios to pay for seats?

As you might of guessed from the above… it varies! But here are a few examples of the value you’d get when using Avios to pay for seats…

On a December London – Male, Maldives flight the cheapest Business Class seat reservation is £178 for 2 seats (£89 each) or 38,500 Avios (19,250 Avios each) this works out as approximately 0.46p a point.

On a July London – Dublin the cheapest Economy seat reservation is £16 for 2 seats (£8 each) or 2,900 Avios (1,450 Avios each) this works out at around 0.55p a point.

On a December Male, Maldives – London flight the cheapest Premium Economy seat reservation is £122 for 2 seats (£61 each) or 25,900 Avios (12,950 Avios each) this works out as approximately 0.47p a point.

Who is this useful for?

If you have status with BA you can select seats in advance anyway (gold & silver can select at booking for free + bronze can select 7 days in advance for free) so the only real benefit is to blue members. But even then it’s not much of a benefit bearing in mind we value an Avios points at 1p and you will get a better rate transferring your Avios to Nectar points and getting 0.8p a point!

Conclusion

We aren’t sure why you’d redeem your Avios for seat selection considering the array of better options you have but nevertheless, it’s an option! Have you ever used Avios to pay for seats?

If you are looking to kick-start your Avios with a huge 200,000 haul don’t forget to take a look at our guide to fast track yourself to a rather cool 200,000 Avios points – https://pointsuncovered.com/american-express/fast-track-yourself-to-2000000-avios-points/